Re: [ubl-lcsc] Re: UBL 0.81 CCT draft-9-mod

[Monica Martin <monica.martin@sun.com>]

Tim McGrath wrote:

> i take your point Jon.
>
> my reaction to this is somewhat akin to yours about list 
> containership. my experience makes me nervous about this idea, even 
> though it sounds sensible.
>
> In EDI syntaxes, X12 has similiar data types to XSD, such as ID 
> (identifier), DT (date), TM(Time), R (percent), etc.  it is 
> interesting to note that when EDIFACT came out it reduced these to 
> three data types (alphabetic, numeric and alpha-numeric).  even so, i 
> have lost count of the times applications needed to use numeric digits 
> in elements defined as alphabetic or needed spaces in 
> numerically-defined elements. 
> i am not advocating we discourage schema validation of data types.  i 
> just wondered if this was best left to the contexts of implementation 
> and should be defined by extension to the 'vanilla' UBL types if the 
> customer wants it.
>
> finally, whichever way we go, we should be consistent - we utilise the 
> precision of XSD datatypes and their derivations (such as dateTime and 
> token) or we don't. at present we appear to be making arbitary decisions.

mm1:
Tim, would it be possible as you indicated to provide an extension for 
optional use to enable implementors. That would provide guidance and, if 
used, more consistency in the approaches that implementors would take 
(perhaps it can be included in the implementation guide).